Anti-Gay Govt. Bias Still at Issue

[canis_lupus]

From Gay City News (New York):

A unanimous three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, based in Denver, ruled on April 22 that the constitutional status of anti-gay discrimination remains so unsettled that a Wyoming public school superintendent found to have discriminated against two lesbian administrators based on "community notions of morality" was immune from liability.

Two of the judges on the panel were appointed by George W. Bush, the third by Ronald Reagan.

Kathleen Milligan-Hitt and Kathryn R. Roberts, a lesbian couple, moved to Sheridan, Wyoming to take up administrative jobs in the public schools there, both working on renewable one-year contracts. Milligan-Hitt was assistant principal of a junior high school, and Roberts principal of a middle school. They both filed suit after their applications for new administrative positions that came open were denied, naming as defendants the school board, the superintendent, and the assistant superintendent.

In the fall of 2002, four months after they accompanied a school field trip to Montana, the women were separately confronted by schools superintendent Craig Dougherty, who said he had received a complaint from parents that during the field trip their daughter had seen them "holding hands and walking into a Victoria's Secret store," according to Judge Michael W. McConnell's opinion for the court. The women testified that this account was "false," and that Dougherty acknowledged it did not "sound like a likely story," but that he discussed it with them because he "wanted to let them know that this had occurred."

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